ICC in 2006: Year One

Legal and political issues surrounding the International Criminal Court

 

• The first collective work from IJT’s editors
• An exclusive forward by Antonio Cassese
• A unique map of the ICC’s activity around the world
• 256 bilingual pages (French and English) of news articles and analysis
• Download cover and table of contents

 
 
 
 
 
INTRODUCTION
 
The ICC for the world’s use
 
In 2006, four years after the Treaty of Rome came into effect in July 2002, the International Criminal Court (ICC) really got to work. The year was marked by the incarceration of the first defendant of the ICC at The Hague [p. 33], the participation of victims as stakeholders in the proceedings, the beginning of the normalization of the Court’s existence on the international scene, with the end of active hostilities on the part of the United States [p. 100], and the first major debates on the role of the court in peace negotiations [p. 41]. So it was that the year 2006 seemed to be and would go down in history as this new court’s “Year 1”.
 
This book, built around the principal articles published on the ICC in the International Justice Tribune (IJT), will allow you to retain a dynamic yet comprehensive vision of the major stages that punctuated 2006 and the key issues that drove it. It describes the increasing importance of the court in the international legal and diplomatic arena. Organized into three chapters – Investigations, Jurisprudence and Complementarity, and Diplomacy – its goal is to understand and analyze the essential developments of the Court in a logical and practical way.
 
Through its still very cautious efforts and its desire to promote its complementarity with national legal systems, the ICC establishes itself both as a very unique instrument for preventing and curbing war crimes and crimes against humanity and as an instrument of justice among others. For, in parallel, the scope of legal and parajudicial initiatives taken over the past fifteen years to render justice for mass crimes and State crimes continually broadened in 2006. From the proliferation of criminal prosecutions and reparation programs in Latin American to the unequalled number of trials opened before the national courts in former Yugoslavia; from trials held in the Netherlands against business men linked to crimes committed in Iraq or Liberia to that under way in the Democratic Republic of Congo against employees of a multinational accused of having supplied the logistics for a civilian massacre; from the opening of a truth and reconciliation commission in Liberia, to the announcement of another in Nepal, to the crumbling of the Spanish model of democratic transition “by amnesia”: the search for justice continually gained new ground and took on the most varied forms.
 
Through its more than thirty correspondents around the globe, IJT provided unparalleled coverage of these multiple initiatives. Forty plus countries were the subject of its investigations, analyses and reports. The ICC held a place of priority proportionate to the importance it is currently gaining. Indeed, while the International Criminal Tribunals for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia are currently completing their mandates, the ICC steps up as the sole inheritor of a fully international model of criminal justice. However, beyond its own personal evolution, the ICC is inseparable from those numerous legal processes in preparation, underway or already completed elsewhere in the world, as well as the non-judicial truth-seeking mechanisms and reparations programs. It reflects a singular problem as much as it falls within a multiform, extraordinarily diverse, contingent and creative search for justice which led to its creation and accompanies its growth. It is this work of describing and analyzing the emergence of the International Criminal Court, without isolating it from the world around it, that IJT hoped to assemble in this book and that it continues to carry out, with rigor and independence, in 2007.